Audit Innovation – What About Your Phone?

How often do you get your phone out to take a quick photo or video something? Quite possibly daily – and yet we rarely think about using this technology to help us with audit. We could though, for example, record a short video explaining how a client’s system works if it is rather complex and likely to take next year’s team a while to understand. We could photograph a document and then annotate to explain what the key features are, as necessary for an audit test. We could even, with appropriate permission, record a client’s explanation of a system, or other important matter, so that we could keep it for next year, or transcribe it later into a systems flowchart.

Now of course there may be reasons why this isn’t practicable for your firm or a particular audit, but given that YouTube is full of videos of “how to…” I suspect they must be helpful. This means we might be missing a trick with the way we record systems notes, points forward for next year and other, particularly complex, areas. So next time you are briefing an audit team, being briefed, or are following complex written instructions, think about whether there is a better way to record this information.

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